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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25776682">Fate's Weapon</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas'>Tyellas</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Terminator (Movies), Terminator Dark Fate</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Angst, Close to Canon, F/F, Grace Lives!, Grace is a mess here, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Suicidal Thoughts, Post-Movie, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, pharmaceuticals</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 07:14:27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,269</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25776682</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Grace went back in time to change the future and save the woman she loved. She didn’t expect to survive doing it. And she's not sure if she'll damage Dani further as a survivor, in all kinds of ways.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Grace Harper/Dani Ramos, Sarah Connor/Grace Harper</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>63</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Rare Pairs Exchange 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Fate's Weapon</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/gifts">geckoholic</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>For the Rare Pairs Exchange 2020, my requestor wanted Dani and Grace, hurt and comfort, angst and consequences. I hope I've brought them all... with Grace's point of view from my Grace-Lives-And-It's-Not-Easy story, <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/21274814"><i>Fate Throws a Dagger.</i> </a></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s all over. The Terminator, the Rev-9, is defeated.</p><p>“Grace…Grace!”</p><p>Grace is flat on her back. She can hear, especially with Dani so close.  She can smell – that most animal sense was untouched by her Augmentations. After the fight and its climactic explosions, the dam’s cavern reeks of burnt electronics.  That’s it. With her power source gone, she can’t see. Or move any muscle that got enhanced. She’s close to paralyzed, locked into her own body. But it’s okay. She’s done everything she meant to, in this time. Been the weapon the future used to change its own fate.</p><p>Honestly, she’d expected dying to take longer, once she’d lost power.</p><p>Her reward is this moment in-between: hearing Dani’s sweet, tear-roughened voice. All the hope of the future in one fiery package, Grace’s future love, still alive. The goddamn fucking relief of knowing her own death will steal her from time’s clutches any minute.</p><p>There’s a loud clunk beside her – maybe a first aid box. It’s just like Dani, to not let her die alone. Grace wishes she could let Dani know it’s all right. After a moment, Grace wishes that even more. She feels, dimly, how Dani is rummaging around inside the dead flesh of Grace’s abdomen. The muscles there, reinforced by Augmentations, are locked still.</p><p>Dani sniffles. Something clicks, like tongs. <em>“Grace. Tengo que probar.”</em></p><p>Grace reels. Probing? What is Dani trying? Why is she sliding her hand back amongst Grace’s blood and mesh and wire connectors and –</p><p>Grace is hit by lightning and kicked in the chest at the same time. Her vision flares back to life, two unfocused rings of sensor-fire, mirroring the pain scorching every inch of her body.</p><p>She’s known this agony once before. The time her Augmentations got powered up. The moment there was no turning back from what she’d chosen, being a living weapon. When she’d officially survived.</p><p>And then, as now, she howls like an animal.</p><p>When Grace stops screaming, she is, amazingly, upright. Dani used the momentum of every muscle in Grace convulsing to get Grace on her feet. She looks down at herself, streaked with blood and black ash. As she does, Dani claps a hand, padded with fabric, over Grace’s gut. It’s too late. Grace has seen what Dani has done: taken the rift she carved into Grace, stabbed into it again with some cables and connectors.  Powered Grace up again.</p><p>Of course, that’s when Sarah reappears from the shadows. Grace hears herself creak, “Hi.”</p><p>It takes Sarah a full fifteen seconds to regain the power of speech. “You. You. You hooked Grace up to a fucking car battery?”</p><p>Grace sways. That would do it. In fact, she can’t think what else could.</p><p>Dani cries, "I won't let Grace die again!"</p><p>Grace winces to hear it.</p><hr/><p>The next hours are a dark, agonized jumble.</p><p>Grace never remembers how they make it out of the dam, into a car, but they do. There, Grace grits her teeth across the back seat, scarcely cushioned by Dani, in pain at every turn and pothole. She begs, frankly, for meds, some kind of painkiller, anything. Dani pets her, shushes her. Sarah says nothing, but turns them off road, parks them somewhere with lights.</p><p>Ten minutes later, Sarah throws a plastic baggie at Dani and barks instructions. Grace isn’t allowed a whole pill of whatever Sarah’s obtained. But it sends relief spinning through her, then welcome unconsciousness. </p><p>By the time Grace pries her eyes open again, it’s daylight, a chill morning. Parts of her feel tighter. Grace lifts an arm: a gash in it has been stitched together.</p><p>She's still in the backseat of the car, head cushioned against Dani's thigh. “Hey,” Grace rasps.</p><p>Dani, half-asleep, starts. <em>“Grace! Vivito!”</em></p><p>“Enh," Grace says.</p><p>“We need to move you into the house.”</p><p>“What house – oh.” A fragment of conversation surfaces in Grace’s memory. “Carl’s.” They’d gone back to Carl’s cabin. Carl isn’t with them. He must have died, like he expected.</p><p>“Can you move?”</p><p>Grace shifts. She’s in no condition to argue: stiff, filthy in several ways, oddly chilled.  She realizes it’s the car battery that’s powering her up now. It’s far weaker than the thorium power source was. She’s moving, but she feels languid, heavy. Slow. Seeing Dani struggling with the thirty-pound car battery, she takes it. She can manage it, just. That’s something. Together, they stagger up to the cabin.</p><p>On the porch, Dani takes the initiative. She cuts what’s left of Grace’s clothes away with scissors. She gets a bucket of water. Grace stops her from sluicing it all over – a lot of her wiring and grids is exposed. Her punishment for protesting that is to be gently dabbed at, stroked everywhere, by Dani, Dani’s hand barely shielded by a little towel. It’s a kind of heaven. It’s another intense agony, considering what Dani said to her in the future, about this young, hopeful Dani here in the past.</p><p>
  <em>Tell me slowly, if you can. I am not going to take this well. And do not say that we were lovers. It is so different, then. You will see…</em>
</p><p>Grace had. Now that she was in the past, its richness and constrictions were unbelievable, based on enough resources to waste. On enough people being alive for multiple, layered societies. Primitive and privileged.</p><p>Dani wrings out her hand towel and surveys Grace. Her small, perfect face tightens with concern. “Can we get you upstairs? Alicia’s room, it has a bed big enough for you, its own bathroom.”</p><p>Leaden, each step freighted with pain, Grace manages. Fortunately, Alicia’s room is the first one off the landing. Grace topples into the cleanest whitest silkiest bed she’s ever known.</p><p>Dani carefully inches the car battery to one side, then beams at Grace. Dani’s beauty, when she smiles, brings back the taunting agony of her. “You look like you.”</p><p>Unbelievably, Grace is still not dead. She won’t be getting out of this easy.</p><p>Again, she creaks, “Can I have some more of that painkiller?”</p><hr/><p>After that epic journey inside, Grace lies there, mostly, for two forgetful weeks.</p><p>As she waits for what will happen next, textures mean a lot to Grace. The cotton sheets are cool, smooth, amazing. Grace arcs her shredded neck over a pile of pillows until the morning Dani whispers that it looks better. Dani, smoothing a hand over Grace’s forehead, adds that she is glad. Is Grace bored? Would she like something to eat?</p><p>Grace would always like something to eat. And she is never bored.</p><p>Grace ignores the books and magazines Dani ferries in. She hasn’t got the focus, what with all the drugs. Inside her, a pump is ticking out tiny increments of what Grace needs to stay alive each second. There’s the heat of steroids, the nausea of boosted antibiotics, the sparkling bustle of nanobots knitting her back together. Backing them up, there’s pills – Grace is too languid to ask what. Most of all, two or three times a day, Dani powders up what Sarah got in that parking lot. Fentanyl, Dani calls it. Grace licks it from Dani’s fingertip. Takes too long doing that, and knows it.</p><p>It’s a delight and a torture to let Dani pamper her. She understands, now, Dani’s generosity after Judgement Day. At the time, it seemed insane of Dani, to always be giving. But Grace sees, here, that Dani has always been like that. She is kind and careful with Grace. Grace can hear her being kind and careful with Sarah. She’s even kind and careful with Alicia’s things, with a broken-framed photo of Carl and Mateo she picked up from the living room floor.</p><p>Most of all, she is terrifyingly determined to ‘fix’ Grace.</p><p>Every day, Sarah sticks her head in. She’s as awful as ever to Grace. It turns out that’s a stimulus Grace needs, like when she was a kid scavenging ruins, forcing down bitter plants for their vitamins. Sarah forces herself and her reminisces of out-of-date Terminators from the wrong future on both of them.  Grace doesn’t say much, but she listens.</p><p>For all the ways Sarah is wrong, she is also profoundly right. Grace remembers meeting Sarah for the first time, seeing her weapons and her ravaged, pared-down self. She was the first person in the past to strike Grace as a real person. Not like the people she shouldered through to get to Dani - walking cliches, ghosts in waiting. Not like past-Dani herself – a vision, a dream, as wavering as the thin magazine pages some people treasured.</p><p>Dani’s textures mean the most of all. Grace is treated to them every night. Their first morning here, Dani had keeled over into bed beside Grace. Since then, she’s always had a reason to stay. It’s true that Grace could still need help at any time. So Dani slides in, tiny in sleep shorts and a top, arms and legs silkier than the sheets, hair both glossy and rough. It’s all Grace can do to keep her hands to herself, especially when the drugs blur past and present.</p><p>The drugs throw Grace’s sleeping schedule off, too. Awake at night, Grace stares at the ceiling’s moonshadows for a very long time. Sometimes, Dani steals off downstairs. Grace plays dead, listening keenly. Always hearing the same thing: Dani, after everything that has happened, weeping. Always feigning sleep when Dani returns and nestles against her.</p><p>Grace knows she should turn her back on Dani’s warmth and silk, angle herself away. But she can’t, with Dani curled on her right side, and the cables trailing out of her left. A lifeline: a grotesque tether. A reminder that she is between death and life. That this woman beside her is pure beauty, next to the machine wreck of herself. Her tenderness is innocent. Has to be, with Grace such a ruin.</p><p>Grace lies there, next to the precious cargo of Dani, and thinks what she can never say. <em>I wasn’t there when you found me. Something’s going to happen. So many terrible things. Don’t waste your time on me…</em></p><p>Is she going to make something happen, first?</p><p>Should she?</p><hr/><p>About two weeks in, Grace finally receives a reason to get out of bed.</p><p>It's mid-morning of a beautiful day when Dani dashes upstairs. She’s been out training more with Sarah, glowing with sweat, smelling slightly of gunpowder. “You are so much better. Can you come downstairs for breakfast? Sarah is giving me advice about men. I cannot take any more!” There’s a quaver in her voice, between tears and laughter.</p><p>Grace instantly sees red. How dare Sarah. How dare that bitch assume –</p><p>She gets up.</p><p>Returning to the stairs isn’t as bad as she fears. It only takes her five minutes to go down. When she staggers into the kitchen, Sarah gives her a sardonic greeting, like she’d expected this any second.</p><p>Grace thuds down at the table. It takes her less time than it did to get downstairs to decide that her suspicions are right. Sarah’s heart rate spikes a certain way when Dani brushes past her. Her eyes track Dani. Grace understands, with Dani prancing around in tight black workout clothes, the most adorable, energetic badass ever. Doesn’t mean Grace likes it. Especially because Sarah isn’t tethered to a fucking car battery.</p><p>But Sarah is unavoidable right now. Grace needs her, and hates her for it, and the next thing Sarah says shows why.</p><p>“I’ll do the supply run at eleven. Make a list.” It’s such a <em>fuck you</em> to Grace, a reminder of all Sarah’s power here. All Grace can do is back up every supply item Dani wants. The last one of those items, a spare car battery, gives Grace her chance. It leads Sarah to eye Grace and ask something awful. “Is your power source the same as a Terminator’s?”</p><p>Through a mouthful, Grace says, “Similar. They’re both hyperbatteries.”</p><p>“We do not have them yet,” Dani said.</p><p>Sarah meets Grace’s eyes. “Can you do your ‘future shit’ to make a replacement?”</p><p>Grace can be grateful to Sarah for this. This chance to say some horrible shit that needs to be said. “We reverse-engineered hyperbatteries from tech we stole off Terminators. The first ones were kindled from the reaction inside a Terminator hyperbattery. You need one to make one. Along with a lab, and a fission reactor, and some rare metals, and some people who don’t exist yet. So, no, I can’t. We need more future shit than we’ve got.”</p><p>Dani looks away, face falling. Grace instantly feels bad. She can’t help adding, “Like Sarah said, just this,” her walking around, she means, “is a miracle.”</p><p>Sarah looks abashed, too, and that’s saying something. She changes the subject, recruits Dani to do something else, yet another distraction.</p><p>Grace keeps packing food in. Considering that if she doesn’t do something soon, it’ll be, in some way she can't grasp, too late.</p><hr/><p>After everything Sarah has put Dani through that day, Dani sleeps fast that night. Grace can smell whatever Sarah brought back from the supply run for Dani’s hair. It’s one more way for Dani to smell good; a last straw, for Grace.</p><p>Grace eases out of the bed, slides a pillow to replace her body’s support of Dani. It’s her turn to go downstairs and try and get a bit of privacy. Clear out the shrapnel rising in her throat. Maybe see if there’s some option for her besides what seems, increasingly, unavoidable.</p><p>When she makes it downstairs, finally, someone else has beat her to it. Sarah is there, coiled on the sofa like a rattlesnake. Sarah can’t sit up straight for the life of her first thing in the morning, and she’s not even trying now, with a tumbler of liquor in her hand.</p><p>“Here to fuck me up?” Sarah lifts her glass towards Grace. “I’m way ahead of you.”</p><p>Grace tries to shunt this aside. As much as she's itching for a fight with Sarah, she knows better. She fakes an errand, fumbles up a pill bottle - and puts it back down when Sarah surprises her.</p><p>“Painkiller of choice here. Want some?” Sarah sounds smug, like she’s pretty sure she can drink Grace under the table.</p><p>Grace smiles tightly. Her Augmentations include a blood scrubber to scour away fatigue acids, blood toxins. That makes ‘drunk’ an unpredictable experience for her. But damn if she doesn’t need a break of some kind. Slowly, she lowers herself and her car battery to the sofas, to Sarah’s level. “I think I do.”</p><p>From the first gulp of liquor, Grace knows this stuff is going to slide past her blood scrubbers. Unlike the future’s Resistance rotgut, this is so smooth it’s almost pharmaceutical. The distiller has made the way Dani feels into a drinkable liquid. Grace downs more. She and Sarah snap back and forth. Their conversation is half-ridiculous, ludicrous posturing, and half-real. Grace finds herself telling Sarah more than she’s ever told Dani – past-Dani, she reminds herself, though that’s increasingly blurry, here and now. They ramble on. Sarah switches them to another, different liquor. Tequila, she calls it.</p><p>Amidst its slide, Grace loses track of time: acts like she’s in her own future, where a private moment was hard won, a rare touch was seduction. After discussing her Augmentations, she holds out her arm, offering that. Sarah takes it. Her hand is surprisingly fine-boned, the pulse fluttering inside like Dani’s does, sweet and fast. Her touch is sure. Why hasn’t Grace thought of this solution before? That would take the edge off for both of them. Leave Dani undisturbed, like Dani's future self had wanted. Grace curls her wrist and is, suddenly, gripping Sarah’s hand. Showing she’d be willing.</p><p>Sarah’s startled gaze meets hers. She says, “All it takes to make you crazy is one future.” Right now, it’s the most profound thing she’s ever said.</p><p>Grace can’t help herself. She half-whispers, “There’s things I don’t tell Dani. Because of the future.”</p><p>Sarah taps fingers against Grace. “The ‘vantage of tequila is I probably won’t remember.”</p><p>Grace shudders with anguish. “I don’t know if it fucks things up. She’s here and alive and so very - I can’t fuck things up.”</p><p>Maybe Sarah feels the same way, because she takes her arm back, replaces it in Grace’s empty hand with their first bottle of liquor. Grace is confused, bereft, until she tunes back into what Sarah is saying; that she’ll be away for a few days. “You’ll be fine here. ‘S the only fine place. You look out for her.”</p><p>She means Dani, of course, and that rips Grace open all over again. Grace coils her fists and snarls, “I can’t. I’m a goddamn mess. I’m weak!” Admitting it, letting the rage at that punch out of her.</p><p>Sarah grabs Grace’s scar-lined wrist again. She hisses, “That works. Do not fucking let her go out – you can do <em>that</em>. Be in pain, wet the bed, whatever it takes. I don’t want her seen. Found. Not just Terminators. I do not want her back in that cage. That human cage.”</p><p>Finally, Grace gets it. “The camp at the border.”</p><p>Sarah gives her a shake. “Fuck, yes. <em>Keep her here.</em> You got that?”</p><p>Grace knows how much she has it, and how little Sarah knows, for her to ask. “I got it – ”</p><p>“Pin her down – ”</p><p>Grace shakes with laughter. “Oh, I will – ”</p><p>Sarah releases her. “Yeah, you got this.” With that, Sarah leaves, taking the second bottle of liquor with her. It takes a moment for Grace to realize she’s gone.</p><p>Grace is so weighted down she can’t follow. With the car battery she hates. And with the realness of the past, the future. It all presses Grace down onto the sofa again. Her head swims with the things she’d said to Sarah. With everything that had happened. That was going to happen again. So much sooner than anyone imagined. To Dani. To her.</p><p>Grace curls up around the bottle, avoiding her cables, to stifle her first tears in years.  </p><hr/><p>“Grace? Grace!”</p><p>Again, Grace is jolted awake by Dani and pain.</p><p>She bolts half-upright. The chill around her, the roughness beneath her, chemical giddiness all disorient her. For an instant, she’s a lieutenant in her bunk, being chewed out by a superior officer after a night of roistering. She’s sick and defiant and embarrassed all at once.</p><p>Until she realizes that’s not her, anymore.</p><p>Grace pries her eyes open properly to peer at Dani, silhouetted against a harsh overhead light. Dani is frowning. Severe. Secure in being right.</p><p>Grace’s Commander, once more.</p><p>The woman Grace, inescapably, loves. Desires.</p><p>Grace closes her eyes for a moment. She remembers where she really is, on an undestroyed sofa, holding a fortune in liquor, in the past. Her pain takes on a different quality, her gut’s ache echoed by her heart. That stern silhouette, hands on hips, has traveled back in time to reinforce what she’s finally admitted. The future is starting – the hell of Judgement Day, all too soon. And she’s along for the ride. Trapped here to fight it, however she can, still a weapon. More, she is doomed to try and live for as long as Dani wants her to. Knowing, now, after sliding against Sarah, what the <em>something</em> is that her slowed pulse urges her towards: relieved that it isn’t, after everything, killing herself.</p><p>Disarmed, surrendering to the pain of existence, Grace sums up everything she’s done in this time, everything she’s going to do. Inevitably.</p><p>“Sorry, ma’am.” And with that, she reaches for Dani.</p>
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